Reducing America's Prison Population With Short, Sure Sentences

A must-watch new video from Reason.tv checks in with UCLA Professor Mark Kleiman, who shares in a short seven minutes his philosophy on preventing crime through a system that guarantees short, consistent sentences for crimes. I hope policymakers are listening.

Kleiman is one of the leading thinkers on criminal justice reform in America today, and his ideas are worth a look. I don’t agree with everything he says, but his plan to reduce the American prison population significantly through short, sure sentences is right on target. Severe sentences are the enemy of swift sentences, he says, because we use so many resources to hand down a 25-year sentence, when a one-year sentence could have the same impact.

“It’s a little strange that the people who are loudest about opposing wasteful government spending haven’t noticed that 25-year sentences are wasteful government spending,” Kleiman says.

As he lays out in his book, “When Brute Force Fails,” Kleiman says elected prosecutors and mayors have misled the public that “randomized severity” is the solution to our crime problems. Randomized may not be exactly the right word, since we certainly see a strong bias toward the poor and people of color in our most severe punishments, but his point is valid. If the punishment for a robbery might be probation or a few years in prison, a criminal will roll the dice. If the punishment is a guaranteed three months in prison, the person might think again.

The difficulty in implementing Kleiman’s system will be in ensuring that it doesn’t create a new world of (shorter) mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws. A new system could be built on the ethos of short, swift punishment while still giving judges a range of discretion to deal with the human cases that come before them.

A sprawling, broken system that wastes its resources on life sentences isn’t as frightening to criminals as one that hands down swift, sure penalties. The experience of Hawaii’s pilot HOPE program has proved this. Kleiman’s on a mission to bring this practice to the rest of the system.

“Basically we have a criminal justice system that doesn’t know what every competent parent knows,” he says. “That you change people’s behavior by giving them clear rules and by enforcing those rules consistenty and quickly and fairly.”

Image Credit: Corey Leopold